In Search of a Lost Screenplay: When Pinter Adapted Proust

If one were to create a stylistic spectrum of great writers in the twentieth century, Harold Pinter and Marcel Proust would likely wind up on opposite ends of it. In Pinter, the meaning lies in what is not said, with the emotional events occurring in those famous pauses that he inserted so liberally within terse dialogue. In Proust, you feel that the author thinks something is important when it is repeated several times within one sentence in slightly different iterations, then again a hundred pages later, and then again a thousand pages later—and only then, perhaps, can a full understanding of it, with every last corner of possible significance swept out into the text, and its contents placed under scrutiny, be aspired to.

So, when choosing a writer to adapt “In Search of Lost Time” for the screen, one would not be inclined to think first of Pinter—and yet, that is what happened. In 1972, a previous collaborator of Pinter’s asked if he’d be interested in working on a screenplay of Proust’s massive work, and Pinter, having read only “Swann’s Way,” accepted. After three months of reading Proust every day, Pinter wrote, in the introduction to the screenplay, that “the one thing of which I was certain was that it would be wrong to attempt to make a film centered around one or two volumes … If the thing was to be done at all, one would have to try to distill the whole work, to incorporate the major themes of the book into an integrated whole.” It was Samuel Beckett who told Pinter to start at the end, with “Time Regained.” Pinter, noting that Proust had written the first volume, “Swann’s Way,” first, and the last volume, “Time Regained,” second, realized that this was a crucial relationship. “The whole book is, as it were, contained in the last volume,” he wrote.

The film was never made. The money for production never came through, and the completed screenplay sat for years, until the actor and director Di Trevis, a friend and the wife of Pinter’s longtime composer, picked it up while looking for distractions during a break in Normandy with her newborn daughter. Several years later, at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Trevis was asked by the director to do a project, anything she wanted, with twenty-nine actors. She began assembling a production of “The Proust Screenplay” for the stage, without informing Pinter of what she was up to. Finally, six months later, she went to meet with Pinter. “I said what I’d done,” Trevis recalled. “And there was this terrible silence. He was good at silences. And he said, ‘Well, that sounds exciting.’ ”

The adapter’s quandary is similar to the translator’s: is the task to stick clunkily but closely to the art of the original, thereby rendering something that will be recognizable to those familiar with the original form, but which is perhaps slightly awkward standing alone? Or is the work itself to be taken as a jumping-off point, from which the adapter or translator’s own particular talents may sweep in and create something related, but with a different texture and its own separate space in the world? In the case of Proust, it’s difficult to imagine the latter scenario, as the entire world of the text literally exists inside the head of, and is filtered through the sieve of subjectivity of, the narrator, Marcel, who may or may not be the same Marcel as the author. But one might say the same of Pinter—it’s hard to imagine him being anything other than fully Pinter. Thus the very first lines of dialogue in Pinter’s screenplay:

DR. PERCEPIED: Well, I must be going. I have to look in to see Monsieur Vinteuil. Not in the best of health, poor man.

FATHER: Mmmnn.

DR. PERCEPIED: His daughter’s friend is staying with them again, apparently.

FATHER (grimly): Is she?

This opening might recall the famous Torcello scene from Pinter’s “Betrayal,” in which Robert learns that his wife, Emma, has been having an affair with his best friend. In that case, what’s being said without being said is that Emma is sleeping with Jerry. Here, it is that the neighbor’s daughter is a lesbian. In that sense, Pinter’s affection for the unspoken is an interesting match for Proust’s brewing subtexts, which often have something to do with the homosexuality of nearly every character in the text, except the narrator himself (which was quite the opposite of the reality for Marcel the author). The visuals of film could have filled in the gaps, and, indeed, in place of words, Pinter wrote a series of images into the screenplay that might have cinematically recreated Proustian memory onscreen in exceedingly brilliant ways.

Trevis was in New York recently to present the first-ever U.S. production of her adaptation of Pinter’s screenplay, a staged reading, at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center. In a discussion before the show, Trevis noted that she’d wanted to avoid trying to fashion something filmlike on the stage, describing her approach as an effort to “try and render for the theatre what the theatre does best.”

The result was a somewhat skeletal, impressionistic portrait of Proust’s novel, a series of staged images and vignettes strung together—Swann dining with a young Marcel’s parents in Combray, while Marcel is upstairs, passing notes to his mother through Françoise; an arguing Swann and Odette; the beautiful Robert de Saint-Loup, in Balbec; the ogreish Baron de Charlus; and, of course, one of the central and most important narratives that weaves through both the text and the play, Marcel’s tempestuous relationship with Albertine.

Trevis had four days to prepare the New York reading, which involved actors with scripts, who were nevertheless extremely deft with frequent changes of character and context, and she brought with her two original cast members, including a strapping Richard Armitage as the stately Swann. One of the towering questions, of course, is what Marcel should be like, once he is no longer just a voice but a body and an energy: stodgy and aristocratic? Nervous and reclusive? Here, Trevis got it right. The British actor Peter Clements played Marcel as a fine balance, both recalcitrant and an observer, at times asserting his considered opinions of the dramas of those around him, at others suffering the disillusions of his inevitable disappointments with those very same figures. Clements is pale and thin and, with makeup, his eyes appear slightly sunken; with a frequent cough, he seemed almost tubercular, like a figure from an Edvard Munch painting, a somewhat fragile neurotic both enlivened and overwhelmed by the excesses of pleasure and emotion that encircle him.

There should have been more of Clements’s Marcel. The problem with grafting Pinter’s adaptation of “In Search of Lost Time” onto the stage is that there are suddenly dozens of characters, where before there was just one. Many, many personalities pass through Proust’s text, but they exist only insofar as Marcel allows them to, and their stories are largely to serve his own purposes, as vehicles to understand himself and his family and his own desires and peculiarities. When actors embody these personalities and are granted lines and stage directions, suddenly each has an agency that seems alien to how he was imagined into being. There is a drama playing out before us, but it is no longer Marcel’s drama alone. A primordial topic of Proust’s text is its embracing interiority, in which the reader may find herself. Once onstage, at least in this imagining of it, that deep pleasure is largely gone.

The exception is the final scene of the play—Marcel stands only with his memories of the people he has known, many of whom are now dead or gone. The stage is flooded with the characters who have strutted and fretted across it for the past two hours. That Trevis has compressed this wondrous sense of memory into a theatrical moment is something remarkable, perhaps approaching how Pinter would have envisioned the scene on film. “His childhood, long forgotten, is suddenly present with him, but the consciousness of himself as a child, his memory of the experience, is more real, more acute than the experience itself,” Pinter wrote, describing with haunting precision the theatrical experience of the moment as well. “When Marcel … says that he is now able to start his work, he has already written it. We have just read it.”

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